Political campaigns have escalated quickly in the U.S. during the 2024 election, and many people haven’t been properly taught the basics of media literacy to dissect what is true versus what is false. With the upcoming presidential election, spreading misinformation will be detrimental to the United States.
According to The Brennan Center for Justice, political ad spending for the 2024 election reached over $619 million. Also, from January 1, 2023, to August 31, 2024, the government spent $248 million on presidential ads, $72.7 million on Senate Ads, and $30.9 million on state and local ads.
CNN Reporters Steve Contorno and David Wright also found that over the first half of October, Trump and his team poured more than $21 million into television ads attacking Vice President Kamala Harris for supporting the rights of transgender people. With this excess of money being spent, political ads can reach multiple demographics, airing on nationally televised NFL games, college football broadcasts, non-political/unrelated YouTube videos, and in battleground states.
The majority of ads that kids are seeing on YouTube lately always seem to have some sort of political message or agenda, which is especially dangerous for young children on the platform. Since many young children usually aren’t able to form their own opinions, they repeat much of what they hear online, which is propaganda and fallacies.
Social Media platforms have lost their grip on Political Advertising, allowing dangerous statements to be made without factual proof or reasoning. Much of this comes down to the money these platforms earn from ads. While YouTube has an age restriction of 13, we all know that little kids are on YouTube watching videos to pass their time.
In our society, technology is constantly at our fingertips, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to prevent children from seeing political ads that contain misinformation. With adsense money, platforms continue to allow posts regarding the presidential election with false facts about the political campaign, allowing anyone to see any form of political content that is endorsed.
With the abundance of political campaign ads being pushed out across all platforms, we must learn how to discern real news from propaganda. University of North Carolina Communications Major Amanda Wicks has great key points on increasing your media literacy skills, saying that how we frame a research question on Google can impact the result we get, which is usually in our favor. Confirmation bias plays a huge role in media literacy and the political ads we see, so there should be policies for political ads.
If you want to change policies of political ads, call the voter hotline at 1-877-VOTESPA (1-877-868-3772). If you want to learn more about media literacy, visit UNC’s article on how to increase your media literacy skills.
